Interesting Google+ blog post from Googler ranting about platforms. Steve Yegge outlines his time at Amazon while they shifted to SOA, Facebook's threat and where he feels Google must go. It's hard to not agree when you see the impressions/traffic and FB Credits revenue Facebook receives from apps others are building on their platform. I was impressed when I learned more than half of products sold on Amazon's platform/marketplace were by 3rd party merchants. Both Amazon and Facebook have the world assisting in their infrastructure, Amazon by selling AWS/services(their dog food) and Facebook by opensourcing.
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FIO - Fusion-IO posted great results during today's investor earnings call! Growing their $1million+ customers this quarter to 6, but, due to customer privacy not able to discuss the specific growth of Facebook or Apple.

During analyst questioning I was happy to hear CEO David Flynn dive into under utilized CPUs and effect on SW licensing. Fusion-IO has the ability to quickly feed data to CPUs keeping them busy, better leveraging software licenses. Anyone that has been through the Oracle or SAP CPU core licensing dance knows were the pain/money is in scaling. David mentioned Amdahl's Law to describe how throwing just CPUs at scaling has diminishing returns plus per core SW licensing costs.

Analysts brought up flash memory competitors LSI and EMC Lightning. David dismisses as different approaches with limitations. EMC's approach built upon their centralized storage, paying twice for a solution. Brings back memories of EMC SAN attaching SUN blade servers to the fabric network with at the time $1k+ fiber cards so that we could be queued in the LUN carving schedule, the money and mess. I have seen Compellent and VMWare pair up nicely but same hops to the CPU and FusionIO is solving for this niche with their product IOTurbine
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It will be interesting to see how Facebook's Open Compute Project will drive the future of the infrastructure ecosystem? Today you can see the published specs for data center (Racks, Battery, Electrical, Mechanical) and server ( Motherboards (AMD & Intel), Power Supply, Chassis) ...but, no storage, yet? Well not exactly, I do see the blog post about standards for HDD to have variable speed to reduce power consumption for 'cold storage'. It seems that the storage layer will remain diverse as there are needs for Hot and Cold node storage. Technology's like Fusion-IO are solving for the hot storage. Maybe we will learn more about Facebook and Apple addoption during Fusion-IO's quarterly report this Wed, Nov 2nd? Here is a company selling OCP spec servers. Disclosure, I do own stock in FIO but no other association.

TED Talks on China:Martin Jacques - Understanding the raise of China - "2020" China expected to have the same sized economy as USA, Top three contributors to China's rise 1- Civilization state verse nation state, example of how Hong Kong has maintained such different rules of law, 2- Race, 90% of Chinese consider them selfs as Han and this identity hold them together 3 - Relationship with Chinese state as head of family.

Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth? China's most limiting future growth factor is development of political system. Argues, Infrastructure is result of economic growth verse driver and that there is "no" statistical "support that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of growth"

Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when Always fun presentations... predicts India economy will match USA in 2048 27th July, well also his 100th birthday. Rosling states his concerns for Aisa growth to be Inequality within India and China, Climate change, war.